| albionus said: I'm with Naz on that one. I also wanted to point out that some people are smart enough to know that forum posts are not rock solid indicators of the 360's reliabilty. It's not the millions of forum posts on this topic that sways most gamers but the stories from reputable gaming sites about swamped 360 repair facilities, 30-35% failure rates, all of their staff going through 4+ 360's, not to mention MS' $1.2 billion warratny extension and confirmation that every 360 made (at least up until the statement in July I believe) suffered the flaw causing the excessive failure rate. Now what this forum post does seem to show is that the switch over to Falcon that was supposed to fix the problem may not in fact have fixed it. It could be an isolated incident but it means any gamer waiting for MS to get the failure rate to a more normal rate would be prudent to hold off on dropping $500. When reputable gaming sites talk about mass layoffs at the 360 repair centers, a failure rate that seems more normal, and MS can go a year without a warranty extension then I think most on the fence gamers will make a decision. Even though threads like this will still exist to some extent most won't care because they aren't the deciding factor to most. |
Agreed. The problem is that MS has established the Xbox 360 as the least reliable device in the history of personal electronics. Few the 30-35% failure rate figures any more -- most suspect it is 60%+
Rather than looking at 'The Internet' you can look at a small for-pay community like the SA forums. They have a 50 page thread of hundreds of people reporting their xbox failed. Many of these people stood up and said, "hey, if yours failed you did something wrong" and ended up coming back with "I never thought it would happen to me." What's even more distrubing is that they keep track of their cases with Microsoft and many of them receive broken units, units in poor condition, or they have something other than their problem repaired. Recently, a guy with the extended warranty sent his 360 to Microsoft because the DVD drive wasn't working and they replaced the motherboard. The DVD drive still didn't work. More commonly, people get someone else's refurbished unit and it may RROD within a week of ownership.
Even units manufactured in August and September (brand new units) have been failing for people, as have been elites that people have been buying from the store in the last few weeks. The failure rate is incredible, and a smaller sample like the SA forum is imperfect but it's a great indicator of what is happening. And the SA forum has been very pro-xbox 360, so these aren't fanboys cheering the 360's demise. These are honest-to-God 360 fans frustrated that their units fail or that they've had to deal with several failures.
